This whole contest was supposed to be easy. I know, I know. Famous last words.

It’s a long story, but I messed up at work. Big time. To earn back the trust of my boss, I promised to save one of our magazines. Yep. That Hot Dad contest you’ve seen advertised all over the place was my idea. And if I’m successful, if I’m able to increase our online readership, then I get a shot at my dream job.

But the one thing I never expected to happen, happened: Contestant number ten, Grayson Malone. Hello, Mr. Difficult. And did I mention sexy as hell?

Unfortunately he knows me. The old me, anyway. And while we might be older now, I remind him of before. Of the woman who broke his heart, who hardened him, and who left him alone to raise the cutest little boy I’ve ever seen.

But I don’t want a relationship. And I definitely don’t fall for single dads with baggage. Even ones with chiseled abs and killer smiles.

But he got to me. They got to me. Him and his son and their messy, crazy life. But I got to him too. I see the stolen glances. I feel the walls he built start to crumble. I recognize that there’s an unexpected beauty to the chaos in his life.

And now that the contest is about to end, we’re left to decide whether the last six months were just fun or if what we have is worth risking it all?

‘Worth the Risk’ begins with the eating of humble pie for a socialite-magazine princess who’s never quite had to work for anything in her life. Sidney Thornton has gotten by because of her famous name—in a somewhat fickle manner—until her magnate father puts his foot down and insists she dislodges the silver spoon in her mouth and work for her salary and the position in the company she’s always wanted.

Grayson Malone is her very reluctant target for the magazine she’s been relegated to working for—a magazine that runs outside her kind of social life—and already, she’s his target for everything wrong in his life. Apparently.

Their history however, with him as the scorned, middle-class kid and her upper-class snooty ways, isn’t one Grayson has forgotten and in many ways, he makes her pay for it. With a chip so large on his shoulder about the woman who left him and his own social-class hang-ups, he can be a bit of an arse as he holds Sidney to the unpleasant memories he has of her as gospel truth.

Basically, he hates her, but wants her.

On the contrary, Sidney’s painted constantly into a corner while crying not fair at everyone (though not without her fair attempt at manipulation, several instances of shallow behaviour and wimpily keeping things from him) and acting like a whipped puppy coming back for more.

Bromberg lays Grayson’s and Sidney’s issues bare from the very start and her writing is compelling enough that it makes you stay the course. Somewhat.

But just as there’s a little progress between them, we’re back at square one, with this push-pull getting rinsed and repeated so much that I thought it stretched the book longer than it should have been. The long and short is, I read this through somehow, but couldn’t find it in myself to sympathise with either Grayson or Sidney at all, too lost as they were in their own heads with their own personal hang-ups and the kind of lifestyles they were determined to lead. Neither quite really fought for each other it seems, so this simply ended up as a story with a pairing I couldn’t get behind at all.

Grant Malone is not the reason I moved back to Sunnyville—at least that’s what I tell myself. Yet, those parting words I said to him back in third grade, ring in my ears every time a townsperson brings up one of the Malone boys. I thought time had healed my wounds. I was wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for how I felt when I finally saw him again.

Twenty years does a lot to turn a boy into a man. One who hits all my buttons—sexy, funny, attractive, and a police officer. But Grant is off limits because he knows too much about my past.

But I’m drawn to him. That damn uniform of his doesn’t hurt either. It’ll be my downfall. I know it.

What’s one night of sex going to hurt . . . right?

***

I’ve always loved Emmy Reeves.

That’s why I’m shocked to see her all these years later. The shy girl I once knew is all grown up.

Adventurous and full of life, she owns my heart now, just as much as she did back then. Convincing her of that is a whole different story.

I’ll give her the one night she asks for—like that’s a hardship—but when it comes to letting her walk away after, she has another thing coming. There’s no way in hell I’m letting her go this time without a fight.

‘Cuffed’ and I got off on the wrong foot.

I gritted my teeth and struggled on for the first half, wondering about the glowing reviews that this book has received, determined to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

After all, there was nothing remotely attractive in a petulant woman holding a childish grudge for a mistake made 20 years ago against a police officer, acting like the biggest flake in the world all because she’s running, commitment-free, from a past that’s yet to be revealed. And the mature woman she’s grown into knows just as well that it’s easier to blame her lack of trust and intimacy on a past she hasn’t gotten over, which is admittedly a tough one.

But there’re an equal number of books these days after all, that deal with the role-reversal of a woman not wanting any strings and being bitchy in her defence of it, whether the rationale for it is justified or not. Nothing really made Emerson any different from those other protagonists who are worn down by the charms of Grant Malone, who has been, up to this point, walking away from every woman he sleeps with because he’s only been ‘passing time with them’, knowing he’s loved her all along.

One would think that two decades might be a tad bit long for a grudge, or that the perception that she’s gained from it should have helped in the intervening years. Evidently not.

I think neither protagonist really interested me, nor could I like them much, which meant I kept reading on just to discover what Grant did in grade school though there are sufficient hints about what really happened. But to get to that is a frustrating exercise seeing Emerson pushing Grant away, just as Grant couldn’t let her go for when he sees her again, resulting in hostile sniping without getting to the heart of the issue…ad nauseam.

In the end, I found it was impossible to get past even the halfway point. There’s just something about the characters that rubbed me the wrong way and clearly ‘Cuffed’, as I suspected from the start, just isn’t the book for me.